by Richard Mark James
WORDSMuch as I like Port in its differing forms, what gives Banyuls and Maury (also named after the places they come from) the edge, for my palate at least, is the simple fact that they're a touch less alcoholic: 16%-17% (sometimes a bit more such as La Tour Vieille's sublime "Meditation Wine" reviewed below) as opposed to around 20% for Port. And it's difficult to resist the charm that seductive Grenache somehow brings to these Vins Doux Naturels (VDNs) or vins mutés: "natural sweet wines" or fortified wines. Anyway, as for a few educational words about these sumptuous stonking reds (mostly): I wrote the following paragraph previously in a blurb on La Coume du Roy, who produce pretty much all imaginable styles of Maury from "modern" to extremely old, which attempts to summarise the diffe...
by Certified Sommelier Leslee Miller
It's holiday time, and we're sure you've bought all your gifts and are getting ready for an onslaught of family and friends. You've got the turkey ordered, your sides planned, and even that amazing dessert is partially completed and tucked in your freezer. It's all done, right? Oh, rats--you haven't picked up any wine yet. What to get to please all the relatives?For our holiday table, we turned to the expertise of Leslee Miller, a certified sommelier and the proprietor of the wine consulting business Amusée. With her trademark mixture of knowledge and humor, she writes, educates, and plans wine events. She learned her trade in the Pacific Northwest and, lucky for us, brought it home to the Midwest (we love her blog too).Miller offers a few of her holiday favorites and says, "Splurging is ...
by Bernard Kenner
With thanks to Union des Grand Crus de Bordeaux, and Balzac Communications who organized the 2007 Tasting at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan, on January 22, 2010, here is my take on the vintage. Keep in mind I only was able to get a feel for the vintage from what I tried; all communes were not represented, nor did I taste everything that was available, as I only had about two hours, trying about 20 wines to get a sense of 2007, rather than critique individual efforts.Overall, the vintage for reds seemed soft, but very serviceable, drinking well now and certainly for a few years. To me, St. Emilion was the gem, with Pomerol close behind. These right bank merlot based wines seemed more balanced between fruit, body, acidity and structure than the Medoc. From St. Emilion, I particularly li...
by David Gaier
As I write this I’m sipping a glass of Pine Ridge’s lovely 2009 Chenin Blanc/Viognier, which as IHOP might say is rutti tutti fresh and fruity. But make no mistake, this piece is about Champagne.In October I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chantal Bregeon-Gonet, who with her brother Pierre Gonet run the Champagne House Philippe Gonet. This house specializes in Blanc de Blancs made entirely from Chardonnay, and their annual production is only about 200,000 bottles or about 17,000 cases.That may sound like a lot of wine, but to give you a reference point, one of the “Grand Marques” – Moet et Chandon – produces about 26 million bottles, or 2.7 million cases each year. You probably already know and have tasted wines from one of these big producers – other names include Veu...
by Tom Lewis
I recently went to a blind tasting and, like most people there, performed fairly badly.We tried a number of IWC-medal-winning wines and were then invited to hazard guesses at grape variety, country, age, alcohol content and price.With a winning score on the night of below 50%, this was no easy test, but I started to wonder why I had failed so miserably and what I was missing. It occurred to me that wine reviewing and blind tasting use exactly opposite skills, albeit they are based on a common starting point.First the commonalities; both activities involve tasting and assessing wine - that's about it ! Once that has been done, the blind taster and the reviewer go in completely different directions.The blind taster's challenge is to guess certain specific facts about the wine without the ben...
by Tom Lewis
Cheese, like wine, is an artisan product - largely hand-made, a living, breathing product that matures and changes over time, each example being ever-so-slightly different from the next and respondings minutely to processes and storage conditions.If you want to see what could happen in the world of mass homogenisation of wine under a fiver in a few years' time, just look at a row of pre-packed, industrially-made cheeses on your local budget supermarket shelf for the potential consequences.In the UK, at least, cheese has gone the way of chicken and salmon - a once expensive and flavoursome delicacy, it is now frequently a mass-market, mass-produced product whose only role is to provide bulk, but not flavour, to a meal.But it was not always the case - in the days before refrigeration, cheese...
by Tom Lewis
I have been a fan of Austrian Riesling for as long as I can remember; it was more or less the first wine I really decided I liked - ripe, aromatic and mouthfilling yet minerally and bracingly dry.Over time, I have also grown to love Chardonnay's more studied and technical complexity, but I immediately took to Riesling's thrillingly racy, slatey, minerally food-friendliness.Unfortunately, not many places do Riesling as well as (or at least in the same full-and-ripe-but-dry style as) Austria, and German examples are typically lighter, gentler and have a hint (sometimes more) of residual sugar.That is not always the case, however, and on a driving holiday in the Mosel a while ago, I found some excellent examples from Kirchengut Wolf.This Klein Riesling is in much the same style as the Wolf wi...
by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I used to travel to Vienna regularly on business - it's a wonderful city, not that easy to live in as a foreigner, but great to visit.It's also where I learnt about how wonderful Austrian wines are - even if very few people are aware of it. I have written elsewhere about the recently history of Austrian wine-making, the glycol scandal of the mid-'80s and subsequent clean-up of the industry and shift towards a fully-dry style.Austrian wines are now some of the best in the world and quite unique - the Wachau produces Rieslings that are full and ripe, yet crisp, minerally and completely dry from the likes of Prager and Knoll; in Styria, Tement and Polz cultivate more aromatic varieties, such as Sauvignon Blanc, that are fully ripe yet piercingly dry, due in part to the long g...
by Tom Lewis
It was a day to mark in the CWB household which called for something out of the ordinary - central Cambridge is a beautiful place and a regular feature on the tourist circuit, but rather as a result of this, the quality of restaurants in the centre of town is not generally that great.However, in recent years, the city has smartened its act up a little and with ever more London commuters living in and around the city, demand for decent restaurants has increased.A few years ago, hoardings went up in front of a row of late-Victorian townhouses on Trumpington Street just opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum. What emerged shortly afterwards was Cambridge's newest sophisticated bistro and luxury hotel, the Hotel Du Vin.Hotel Du Vin is an upmarket chain of 14 hotels (at present) owned by the Massey Pa...
by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Vienna - present-day Austria's capital and the historic imperial city of various empires (Austrian, Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian). It's a beautiful place and at the time was undergoing something of a quiet, steady revolution, and transforming itself from a sleepy, time-warped, patrician capital into a vibrant and sophisticated city.It was the type of place where amongst the imposing Gothic cathedrals and sprawling Imperial palaces of old Vienna, you would find sophisticated wine bars and fusion restaurants of new Vienna; a great place to try Austrian wines which have improved dramatically since the anti-freeze scandal of 1980s.Austria is in almost every sense wedged between Germany and Italy - it has a Germanic thoroughness, precision and obsession...
